“Confidence is the most important single factor in this game, and no matter how great your natural talent, there is only one way to obtain and sustain it: work.” – Jack Nicklaus (Golf Legend)

Have you ever got yourself lost even when you thought you knew the way? In other words, you had a mental map of how to get to a particular place because you’ve been there before, and yet the next time you attempted to get there you got yourself lost. You had good intentions, you were positive, and confident, but you didn’t seem to understand your mental map well enough. Golf is a lot like that. Your internal golf map that gets you to good golf is not the same map that gets you to disappointing golf. They are slightly different.

Do You Have Golf Stress?
What is your strategy for dealing with a bad hole currently? When you hit a bad golf shot, or play a bad hole, how do you re-focus your mental energy so that you can bounce back positively, and maintain your momentum? Many golfers I’ve worked with at my golf school have told me that they simply carry the anguish and discomfort of bad golf around with them until they eventually forget about it and start performing better again.

Stress in golf in very common, but it doesn’t have to be a burden. In fact, contrary to popular belief stress is very helpful to us because it helps us to adapt and grow. Without stress we simply couldn’t function optimally. To develop more golf confidence we need to realize that our perception of an event can profoundly influence our feelings and thoughts and create more or less golf stress. For instance, if you are attempting to play golf shots that are outside your scope of competence then it’s highly likely that you will run into some stress.

Your Thoughts Have a Strategy
Being disappointed about a poor shot is a strategy. So is being happy about a good shot, or being relaxed, or being angry etc. They are psycho-physical states we give ourselves permission to go into, and you need to understand how to get yourself into a more positive and confident golf state after you have a hick up or melt down during your round.

What some people call a “mind set” is just another way of saying that you’re giving your thoughts a consistent mental direction to go in. Be careful as these thoughts affect your feelings and ultimately your actions. “Can’t hit the ball at all” for example, is a negative mental strategy that leads to more of the same. How “stressed” you become with your golf is simply a sign of your level of competence at managing your emotions when things aren’t going the way you want them to.

When you are hitting the ball well what are you seeing, feeling or experiencing? What happens when things are going right for you on the golf course? How is it different from the stressful state you can get yourself into when things aren’t going well for you? There’s a distinction that you need to begin recognizing to move yourself towards effectively managing your mental-emotional state.

Playing in the Golf Confidence Zone
My suggestion is to become aware of your feelings and thoughts when you have a bad hole and immediately change your state by moving towards something positive that will change your state. I call this the golf confidence zone, and the rules for accessing the golf confidence zone are relatively simple. Your behavior is affected by strong emotional events in your life that have the potential to become imprinted or branded into your psyche.

If you are moving into negative performance states on the golf course try the following suggestions to get yourself playing in the golf confidence zone more often.

• You can carry a really funny joke card around with you that has jokes that really make you laugh out loud, can change your state.
• You can think about anything weird, bizarre or out of the ordinary that can change how you feel in the moment – be creative, make it a fun experience.
• Your can look at a photo of your family or relatives to bring you back to reality.
• You can place a thick rubber band on your wrist and anytime you recognize that you’re heading towards the negative zone you could pull the band back and “snap” yourself back to reality.

Real life experiences and events are powerful triggers for changing your golf state, but a well developed imagination can do the same thing. This is why Olympic champions are trained to develop their visualization skills from an early age and practice them with the same intensity that they would in real life almost every day.

If you want to get over a bad golf score, or a bad hole, then practice the new mental strategy of moving into the golf confidence zone whenever you recognize that you’re going to golf’s dark side. Rewiring your old patterns of thinking and behaving simply requires you to give them a positive mental direction to move towards.

Strategic and targeted thinking skills will lead you to performing at your golf more consistently, with greater golf confidence, positive energy and personal control. There is so much upside that your goal over the next four weeks should be practice going into the golf confidence zone as often as you can. It will be well worth your effort.

To your golfing success.

Lawrie Montague

“I think exercise tests us in so many ways, our skills, our hearts, our ability to bounce back after setbacks. This is the inner beauty of sports and competition, and it can serve us all well as adult athletes.” – Peggy Fleming (US Figure Skater)

Is there anything worse than playing one bad hole that ruins what was potentially one of the best rounds of your golfing life? For many golfers there is nothing worse. It’s hard to be philosophical when you have just had an eight on the last hole! You could simply put it down to experience and acknowledge that if you can get yourself into a position to produce an excellent round once, you can do it again.

So how do you rebound from a bad hole/s that keeps your score average higher than it should be? At my golfing school I get asked this question a lot of times. The first thing to understand is that just because you have a bad hole doesn’t mean that there is something wrong with you, or your game. You are not your bad golf score! Golf is a game built upon mistakes not good shot’s. It’s a highly technical game that for the most part can’t be mastered consistently by anyone; not even Tiger Woods.

Look at the scores of PGA tour golfers and LPGA golfers and you’ll see that their golf scores ebb and flow from hole to hole and round to round. Of all the statistics on the PGA tour the one the touring professional’s value almost as highly as the low score average is the “bounce back” statistic. The bounce back statistic measures the percentage of holes on which a golfer is over par on one hole and under par on the next. It’s another way of expressing the player’s ability to forget the past hole and get on with the next shot.

It is totally unrealistic to think that any golfer can achieve consistency when the golfing environment you play in changes constantly. In fact we can say that the only thing that is consistent about golf is that it is inconsistent. It changes and so should you.

This means that you should develop a more flexible mind-set. If you’re someone who has at least one bad hole during a round, then you should ask yourself whether your mind-set is consistent and inflexible. My experience working with many golfers over the past twenty years at my golfing school is that they become rigid and unbending in their thinking and as a consequence play their golf course with the same game plan over and over.

You should appreciate that you have many ways that you can play a hole and produce your score. So if you tend to play a certain hole with less than ideal results from week to week, then you should consider an entirely different approach to playing that hole. Bad holes usually result from a defensive attitude to playing the hole. The simple way to overcome this defensive attitude is to play a golf club from the tee that you know you can play confidently at least seventy percent of the time.

It doesn’t make sense hitting your driver off the tee if you can only hit it in the fairway a low percentage of times. This will place excessive pressure on you and you will not make a positive, free-flowing golf swing. If instead, you hit a five wood from the tee because your percentage of success is much higher; your positive attitude will definitely help you to produce a better score on the hole.

The next time you go out for a round of golf make a contract with yourself that you will play your entire round using golf clubs that you wouldn’t normally use. You will discover a rare and exciting freedom in letting go of your old and tired approach to the game in favour of a more flexible and positive approach that will have you bouncing back better than you ever have.

Until next time.

Lawrie Montague